On May 28th the National Key Research Center for Linguistics and Applied Linguistics hosted a talk on language acquisition by Dr. Rushen Shi, a psychology professor from the University of Quebec. The talk drew a large and attentive audience that included faculty and students from CLAL as well as other departments.      

In her talk, entitled “Bootstrapping Language Acquisition”, Dr. Shi provided an eloquent summary of her prolific infant projects, organized around her view of grammar acquisition. As Dr. Shi explained, her view assumes that acquisition begins in early infancy with the establishment of two broad classes of syntactic categories, function words (e.g., articles and pronouns) and content words (e.g., nouns and verbs). Dr. Shi went over the perceptual and functional differences between these classes and discussed her classic work showing that infants can distinguish these classes from the first days of life. She then reviewed her work indicating that infants not only separate function words from content words, but also separate subclasses of function words (e.g., masculine and feminine articles) and track the relations between function words and content words. Moreover, infants use function words as cues for segmenting words in fluent speech, for separating different subclasses of content words and, ultimately, for mapping words to meaning. In short, infants’ representations of function words “bootstrap” grammar acquisition and language acquisition more generally. On the basis of such findings, Dr. Shi concluded that infants’ grammar knowledge is more abstract that previously thought.      

Dr. Shi’s talk was well received, with audience members complementing her for the breadth of the work covered and the clarity with which research findings and methodologies were introduced. In addition, her talk elicited insightful questions from audience members that point to interesting directions for future research.